Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) is a cluster technology that provides to a cluster of servers shared access to a shared file system volume that is accessible to all nodes within the cluster, e.g., for read/write operations. CSV volumes have been used to store virtual machine (VM) data on virtual hard disks (VHD) that are accessible to all servers in the cluster.
Backup solutions, such as EMC Networker®, typically utilize all the nodes from a Preferred Server Order List (PSOL) in round robin fashion to back up a CSV volume, but each node will back up only one volume at a time and once the backup of the CSV volume is complete, then the node goes into idle state. If only one CSV volume is present, only the first node in the PSOL is utilized and any remaining node(s) remain(s) idle and never get(s) used.
For example, there may be multiple nodes (n) in the CSV setup and only a single CSV volume that is being managed. A particular node N1 may be the current owner of the CSV volume. When the backup of the CSV is preformed from the virtual or other backup client, the node from which the backup is initiated may be selected from the order list specified in the PSOL to perform the backup. All other nodes in the CSV setup would remain idle.
In another example, there may be multiple nodes (n) and multiple CSV volumes (m) that are present. Node N1 may be managing one/more CSV volumes, node N2 may be managing one/more other CSV volumes, and so on. When the backup is triggered from the virtual client a save operation may be spawned from the nodes selected from the PSOL list in a round robin fashion. When a particular node is done with the backup it goes into an idle state along with other nodes, which don't participate in the backup even when the backup operation is being performed on other nodes in the cluster.